“I just can’t believe we were stupid enough to do that in public, and I can’t believe someone would stoop low enough to sell that to the press.”
“People will do anything for money, Ali. The sooner you learn that, the better off you and the boys will be.” She leans around me and runs the water. “Now do you need me to undress you or have you got it covered?”
“I got it. I’m fine.”
“Good, then take as long as you like, but remember none of them have showered after coming off-stage, so unless you want the bus to smell like stinky jock sweat all night, I’d save a little hot water if I were you.”
Once she’s gone, I undress and jump beneath the weak, warm spray. Sadly, it’s not even hot enough to take the chill from my bones, but at least I don’t smell like vomit anymore. Deb or one of the boys must have gone through my stuff to find me some clothes, because there’s a pair of jammies sitting just inside the door when I get out of the shower. I dry and put them on, and then I open the door to face the music. Pity the music is just a mess of my own creation.
The giant flat screen shows video footage of the elevator where we had sex. The elevator where we had sex, believing we were in the dark. Because if the elevator was down, then surely the computers and cameras were, too, because that totally makes sense.
I sigh internally, covering my face with my hands as I watch a black and white us go at it in the lift with tiny pixelated black squares that say “too rude” covering our bits from the world. It looks as though whoever was operating the camera that day figured himself an amateur porn cameraman, because it cuts to several different angles and zooms in on the money shot, which is of course of Levi coming down my throat while Cooper comes inside me.
“Well if you’re gonna make a porno, there are certainly worse ways to do it,” Deb says. “Levi, I never gave you enough credit. I apologise to your penis. It’s fucking huge.”
“Can you stop watching this please?” Coop says to Deb through gritted teeth.
The segment cuts back to an overly tanned reporter in a tight dress, and pictures of our “Wild North American Tour” flash up on the screen one at a time. Cooper hustling a soaking wet, doe-eyed version of me out of the car tonight, the vomit on my lucky red Cons clearly visible. Levi pinching my arse as I walked through the lobby of Wynn in Vegas in only a blanket. There’s another of Levi punching the pap, and a shot of the guy laid out on the ground. The camera pans back to the reporter, showing her standing with a man out the front of the Bridgestone Arena. His face is vaguely familiar, and it takes me a moment or two to place him. The driver from the hotel in Little Rock.
He talks to the reporter about how we openly engaged in sexual intercourse in the back of his limo, and I want to die.
“There you have it. These wild rockers and their redhead are reportedly the real thing. But with all the backlash this is sure to bring our mysterious Aussie redhead, has she bitten off more than she can chew?” the reporter asks, with a fake smile and a nasty gleam in her eye, and then they show an image of me, taken not more than two hours ago chowing down on a hotdog. My skin looks pasty, my hair is up in a messy bun, there’s mustard on my face, and my eyes are round and surprised. I look like shit. I look like a stunned mullet. It’s the most unflattering photo of me ever taken, and that little bitch sold it to E! fucking News?
“That’s my girl. She loves her sausage,” Levi says, probably to break the silence more than anything.
I bolt upright, away from the couch, and I glare at him.
“This is funny, is it? It might be all elevator sex and blow jobs for you, Levi, but this is my life. I’m not a rock star; the second Vanessa sees these, I’m fucked. I’m out of a job, not to mention that the entire Internet has now branded me a whore, which I guess isn’t that far from the truth. I am banging two members of the world’s hottest rock band, just like they said.”
I stalk off towards the bedroom, because even though the tour bus doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for privacy, and they’ll likely hear everything anyway, I can’t do this in front of the others.
The boys follow me in and Levi rubs his hands on my shoulders, pressing a kiss to my neck.
“Can you not touch me right now please?” I say, holding my hands up for him to stop and slipping out of his grasp. And then I feel like shit when he pouts like a small child.
“Okay, you need to calm the fuck down, Red. It’s not that bad,” Levi says, as Cooper locks the door and flops down in the middle of the bed.
“Oh, it’s that bad. It’s so bad my Grams is probably rolling in her grave right now. Thank god my parents aren’t around, because if they were, I’m sure these vultures would be banging down their doors, trying to get the scoop on the tainted band slut,” I shout.
“What happened to your parents?” Levi asks and I just glare at him. It’s not his fault, it’s not like I’ve ever talked about my family with him, but it bothers me that he can be so physically invested in someone and not know the small details about them.
“Her mother left and her dad was a deadbeat,” Cooper says. “Just like me.”
“Coop,” I say, and I can’t help but reach out and touch him, “you’re not a deadbeat dad. You love your little girl, and I’m sure she won’t ever be able to question that. What happened with you and your ex has nothing to do with how good a father you are.”
I hadn’t met Pepper, but I’d seen the videos Deb had taken of him holding her. I’d been in the room when he Skyped with Pepper. He was a great dad, or he would be if he was given half a chance to see her more, but distance, recording, and a gruelling world tour meant that spending time with his little girl was an impossibility right now. That wasn’t anyone’s fault—it just was what it was.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to make this shit about me.”
“It’s fine, it is about you. It’s about all of us—”
“Yeah, everything is about Coop.” Levi scrubs his hand over his chin.
“Levi,” I chastise. I’m about to ask him what the hell he’s going on about when he brushes past and pushes out into the hallway. “Where the hell are you going?”
“To get some sleep.”
“Don’t be a dick, man,” Cooper says. “This isn’t about you or me. It’s about all three of us.”
“Whatever,” he says, and slides the door shut. I shake my head as tears spring into my eyes.
“Fuck him,” Coop says, hooking his arm around my waist and pulling me into the middle of the bed, his body wrapped tightly around me.
I give a little humourless laugh. “I’m pretty sure that’s what got me in this mess in the first place.”
He chuckles, and presses a kiss to my forehead as he settles me into the crook of his arm. “Yeah, you’re right. You really shouldn’t fuck him.”
This time I do laugh. “What are we doing here, Cooper?”
“Well right now, you’re tucked into my arm, which I’m pretty sure is right where you should be—”
“Oh, really?”
“Yep, exactly where you should be. And we’re going to sleep.”
“Just sleep?” I slide my hand under his shirt, tracing circles over the flesh of his hard abdomen.
“Just sleep.” Cooper hooks his arm behind my knee and tugs it over his leg, smoothing his palm along the outside of my thigh and down to my arse. He hits the switch on the side of the bed and turns out the lights, and the whole room is steeped in a soft blue glow. He lays a kiss to the top of my head and whispers, “Sleep, Ali.”
Only we don’t sleep, because he slides his hands up my shirt and palms my breast, and then he shifts out from under me and flips me onto my back, erasing all of the guilt, the shame and the embarrassment with his mouth and teeth and hands. Before long, our clothing decorates the room around us. Cooper pushes into me and we move together, tasting, touching and exploring one another’s bodies. We come together, almost silently, afraid to disturb the peace we’ve found here in the darkness.
I had
n’t intended to exclude Levi. In my own way I had grown to love him, but it was clear as day where my heart lied, and it wasn’t with the lead guitarist who had a twelve-inch cock. It was with the man softly singing “All I Want is You” by U2 in my ear as his cock softened inside me and his come slowly trickled out of me to stain the sheets. We fall asleep like that, naked and sated, and all twisted up in one another.
Sometime before dawn, I woke to Cooper’s mouth on me, and I slid my hands into short, soft hair. Only it wasn’t curly. It felt different, and so did the mouth on my pussy. It was too late to stop it, though. I didn’t know how long he’d been going down on me in my sleep but I came hard, as quietly as I could, so as not to wake Coop. Levi runs his stubble-rough jaw along the inside of my thigh, wiping my arousal off on my flesh, a reminder that he knows how to get me off just as well as Cooper, and he isn’t afraid to prove it to me.
He carefully crawls up the bed and leans in, his lips softly brushing the shell of my ear, and he whispers, “If he’s going to fight dirty, you should know that that’s a game I invented.”
“No one’s fighting over anything, Levi,” I whisper, smoothing my fingertips over his eyebrow, toying with the little silver spike.
“Oh, they’re fighting. You’re just too blind to see it.”
“Levi …” I begin, but he presses a soft wet kiss to my neck that burns me like a brand, and then he disappears.
I exhale and burst into tears, but I quickly cover my mouth to stifle any sound in the hope I won’t wake Coop. He rolls over and wraps a heavy arm around me, tucking me in against his side. I freeze.
“He’s right. I am fighting dirty, and I’m not going to stop until you’re mine,” Coop whispers against my hair. “I hope he enjoyed the taste of my come in your pussy.”
Why do we do this to one another? Why couldn’t we all just walk away? Why couldn’t I just walk away, before this thing ruined not just our careers, but our lives too? I didn’t have the answers, but I knew I couldn’t give this up. Even if it destroyed me.
I couldn’t.
I toss the controller aside and stretch out on the big bed in the back room next to Levi.
“We’re giving up already?” Levi asks, putting his controller on the ground beside the table.
“I’m kinda tired, and my eyes hurt.” I shrug. “Plus, you suck at video games.”
“Know what I don’t suck at?” he asks, waggling his brows at me.
I laugh, despite the weird mood I’m in. I’m restless and want off the bus, but what’s the point? Anywhere I go, we’re flagged down by paparazzi and dogged with questions about our little sex tape. We were chased out of a freaking McDonald’s the other day because some overzealous fangirls cornered me in the bathroom, bombarding me with questions about Coop and Levi. It’d taken everything I had within me to not punch them in their heavily made-up pubescent faces. At their age, I didn’t even know that penises came in a different size, let alone wanting to know how it felt to have a twelve-inch cock inside you. They’d thrown around sentences like, “I wish the boys from Taint would DP me.” And, “Do you have to do like a million Kegels exercises to be able to take that much cock?”
I’d stared at them in the mirror and wondered what the hell was wrong with the girls. How was it possible that they were so sexualised from such a young age? And then it hit me—I was the problem. Women like me, who fucked two men at once in a public place and had video evidence out there for all of the wonderful World Wide Web to see. People like me made it okay.
I had ended up telling them that the video coming out was the most humiliating thing I’d ever endured. But when they’d asked why, with these genuinely blank faces, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to talk sense into them. They were young and impressionable, and to them it was an accomplishment to get two rock stars to want to sleep with you. No doubt that seemed like an accomplishment to a lot of females. Women my age and older threw themselves at Taint as if they were gods, and in many ways, in and out of the bedroom, they were. But they were also human, just like me. They made mistakes. We all had. And in the end, I’d run from that bathroom like a coward.
I sigh and snuggle under the duvet. Levi picks up a strand of my hair and plays with it. “What’s up, Red?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“I’m just restless.”
“I can help with that,” he says, and I sigh again. “Or not.”
He pulls me closer to him, and I expect him to kiss me or to slip his hand beneath the covers and convince me to want to mess around, but he doesn’t. He flips me onto my side and pulls me hard against his body, wrapping me up in his arms.
We practically have the bus to ourselves. Coop and Zed had agreed to several radio interviews, and Ash had gone along with them. We all would have gone, but Deb had vetoed me and Levi being anywhere near the radio jockeys. They had a reputation for being ruthless. Cooper was smart; he could be mad as a cut snake, but his rage would simmer beneath the surface and he wasn’t prone to rash decisions. Levi? Not so much. The band had temporarily vetoed Levi from all publicity to keep him from losing his cool.
Oddly, the second that Vanessa got word in Australia about what was going on, she hadn’t fired me. Instead, she’d tried to encourage us to be more vocal about our relationship. None of us wanted that, and we all saw it as a ploy for the record company to make money. Sales of Taint’s newest album had gone through the roof; the problem was that no one was talking about the music. Not when there was a risqué little rock star ménage à trois to talk about.
Coop had been pissed when he’d left early this morning. I wasn’t sure what that had been about, but it had left me with this wicked ache in my chest all day.
Deb had taken advantage of the shopping in Atlanta, and had been gone since early this morning. James was asleep on his bunk, getting in as much rest time as he could before driving through to Charlotte tomorrow, where the boys would play an intimate show to only forty exclusive ticket holders.
For the most part, Levi and I were alone. We should be making the best of that time, but it just felt … off. Instead, I pick up the remote and switch on Netflix. I’m behind on Game of Thrones, on account of me not having owned a TV—or a bed to sleep in—before we came on tour. I select the episode I want and we watch. Ten minutes later, Daenerys Targaryen is bathing onscreen with a heavily muscled actor in a bad wig.
“Christ she’s hot,” Levi says.
“I know, right? It’s sickening.”
“Babe, you’re easily that gorgeous,” he says, tenderly kissing my shoulder.
I can’t help it. I laugh. “Oh my god you’re such a liar. You’d say anything to get a woman to sleep with you, wouldn’t you?”
“What the fuck does that mean?” he asks, and I know by his tone I’ve hurt him.
I roll over in his arms and look at him. “Levi, everyone knows you’d sleep with anything that moves. I’m nothing special; I’m just a girl who got really lucky. Or really unlucky, when you consider all the shit that’s happened since I said yes to this job.”
“You’re special to me.”
“Why? Because I let you do anal?” I say, tracing my finger along his lips.
He pulls away, his brow creased, and those pretty hazel eyes of his hard. “I’m serious.”
I frown as I look up at him. “You really mean that.”
“Yeah, I really fucking do. You think I tell everyone that shit? I know you think I’m a heartless douche, Ali, but I’m not. I’m just better at hiding my feelings than Coop is.”
“I don’t think you’re a douche. A cockhead maybe, but not a douche,” I tease.
“A cockhead, huh?” He grins, and rolls me over onto my back, leaning down to kiss me. “Well this cockhead’s cock wants inside you.”
“Can we just … not, right this second?”
“Yeah.” He frowns and a muscle in his jaw tightens. He pushes up on his elbows and shifts, flopping back down on the bed beside me.
>
“I feel like you and I never get to just … be together, you know? Like we don’t do anything but fuck.”
I expect him to pout over that, but he doesn’t. He pulls me into him and we tangle our legs together. We’re both fully dressed beneath the duvet, but it’s nice to be close like this without it being sexual. Don’t get me wrong—if there’s one guy you want things to turn sexual with, it’s Levi … or Levi and Coop, considering they’re both fucking incredible lovers, but I get things from Coop that I don’t get from Levi.
There’s always this disconnect between us. We come together and we feed off one another’s pleasure, but even when our bodies merge, I won’t give him all of me. I can’t. Because there’s a part of me that belongs to another man, and deep down I suspect that all of us know it.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t care for him, though. I don’t know whether all the cock has made me extra specially stupid when it comes to these boys, but the idea of being without either one of them hits me like an anvil to the chest. There’s something innately vulnerable about Levi. He hides behind his rock-star swagger and that enormous cock, but there’s so much more to him than that. It’s not even buried very far beneath the surface, but I suspect that before me, nobody had even bothered to look.
I see it now, though—how tender hearted he is, how carefully he holds precious things. I feel it in the way he’s holding me now. Our bodies are as tangled and as close to one another as we can get without him being inside me. Even through our jeans, the hard length of him is pressed against my inner thigh. Desire stirs within me, but I simply press a soft kiss to his lips and let out a contented sigh as I snuggle deeper.
I wake with a start, and kick off the covers. My skin prickles with sweat. Levi’s body is still wrapped around mine, and I snuggle deeper. Then I jolt out of the sleep haze, my eyes widening at a very pissed-off Cooper at the end of the bed.
“Oh my god, you scared the bajeebus out of me.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb the two of you,” he says that with so much restrained anger in his voice, I find myself flinching.
Revelry (Taint #1) Page 22
